Why do we accuse someone who talks on and on, giving us more details than we were ever interested in, of ‘rabbiting on’?
The expression is first recorded in 1950, in a book published that year called Lag’s Lexicon.
This was compiled and written by Paul Tempest and is a record of prison slang (hence the use of the word ‘lag’—English slang for an old crim).
To those doing ‘porridge’ behind bars ‘rabbit on’ meant, ‘One who ‘rabbits’ all the time is one who never stops talking.’
And if you were stuck sharing a cell with a such a person, I can well understand how it would really get on your wick after a while.
The official definition by the Oxford wise ones says that to ‘rabbit on’ means, ‘To talk volubly to chatter; to speak or write at length, without saying anything important.’
Although some other dictionaries (including the Cambridge and the Collins) add that ‘rabbiting on’ means talking not only at length, but also on a subject of no interest to the person you’re speaking to.
Doubly annoying!
(Something you and I would never do, right? Right!)
Mind you there are some distinguished people who have been accused of ‘rabbiting on.’
When Umberto Eco’s best-selling novel The Name of the Rose was first published, the reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald said, ‘Umberto Eco spent the first 100 closely typed pages of The Name of the Rose rabbiting on about Benedictine history, before getting to the murder that kickstarted the plot.’
Well, I read the novel when it first came out, and I was gripped from page one (and it became a major movie starring Sean Connery—so I was not the only one).
Perhaps ‘rabbiting on’ is in the eye of the beholder?
And why this word for constant talking?
None of the experts makes any suggestions, so here is mine: the person ‘rabbiting on’ breeds words as prolifically and as rapidly as rabbits breed rabbits.
At least my idea seems possible, doesn’t it?
Tonight I will join Peta Credlin on News24 for 'Words Matter.'
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